Facebook post, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Music , 16/11/2025
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As someone born on 13 November 1980, I was given no more than 25 days to enjoy the thought that the four members of the Beatles might one day play together again. A few gunshots at the entrance to the Dakota building in Manhattan, on 8 December 1980, ended that hope forever. Even when I truly began discovering the music of the Fab Four from Liverpool—sometime around the age of ten—the idea of a “reunion” of the greatest band in history remained nothing more than a fantasy. Who could have imagined that only a few years later, the world would be stunned when the three surviving members reunited in the studio and recorded, over John Lennon’s homemade tapes, the songs “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”? Given the technological limitations of the mid-1990s, working with home recordings that were themselves already twenty years old, Lennon’s vocal lines in these “new” tracks came with heavy background noise and clumsy piano accompaniment that could not be removed, despite being completely unnecessary next to the fresh new tracks added by Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. On the third song they intended to record, “Now and Then,” the noise on Lennon’s original tape was simply too strong, and it remained on the cutting-room floor.
I remember the heated debates about all the musical, technological, and ethical problems raised by the song and by the act of “summoning” Lennon from beyond. In truth, having witnessed the song’s release shaped my perception of it very differently from all the band’s other songs; I saw “Free as a Bird” as a kind of curiosity. And yet, with the distance of years, even this strange song—with its loud greeting from the afterlife—managed to become a classic. Meanwhile, George Harrison also passed away in 2001, but this time I already knew: Harrison said goodbye, but technology says hello.
Indeed, the remarkable advances of recent years in artificial intelligence and machine learning have not passed over the legacy of the greatest pop band in history. For the production of the documentary Get Back, director Peter Jackson harnessed the new technology and “cleaned” dozens of hours of rehearsal recordings from January 1969 in order to incorporate them into the series. McCartney realized it might be time to revive the third song as well, and thus, in October 2023, “Now and Then” was finally released. Suddenly Lennon’s voice sounded clean, as if it had been recorded just last week. And now, ahead of the release of the fourth volume of the Anthology project, the band has issued a new mix of “Free as a Bird”, free of all the background noises that could not be removed in 1995. Naturally, the problems and debates are resurfacing (now joined by complaints from those nostalgic for the raw 1995 technology and Lennon’s background noise, which lent the song a slightly supernatural quality).
I see this new song as an invitation to reflect: a call to think about technology—something the Beatles were always at the forefront of—and especially about the way we harness “the technology of tomorrow” to celebrate “yesterday.” For all our talk about progress, and about how artificial intelligence will change the future, our biggest headlines are often about how AI can bring us back to the past. All our lives we grapple with history; our cynical politicians try to rewrite it; and the eternal question of the father of modern philology, “What actually happened?”, not only haunts us at night but also drives tremendous advances in science and in the expansion of human knowledge. Even in this song, Lennon—who, to our deep sorrow, symbolizes the unattainable past—asks to be “free as a bird,” perhaps pleading to be left alone, along with the home tapes he left behind. And McCartney, who added a few lines to Lennon’s text, refuses to let go and asks: “Whatever happened to the life that we once knew? Can we really live without each other?” By producing the song at all, and by insisting on updating it and continually cleaning up the background noise in our dialogue with the past, Paul gives a resounding answer: “No, John—we truly cannot live without our past.”
So the next time someone asks why you devote yourself to studying the history of human culture, art, and the past—remind them that quite a bit of our most futuristic technology is trying to do exactly the same thing.